| If I ever saw Joni Mitchell face-to-face I believe I would fall down at her feet and kiss her shoes.
If I ever saw Jay-Z walking around...I know I'd like to have one of those black fedoras with the stingy brim so I might subtly tip my hat to him.
Actually, I believe I did see him once on the J train. For a while when I lived in Bklyn and used the M train they were working on the tracks and so only one train traveled one direction at one time on a certain line so I ended up on a J train. Anyways that's when I saw him, on that J train. He really seemed to stand out, had an aura about him, even though in some ways he looks very unassuming; and this was before he was famous, mind you, I saw a picture later and was, like: "I saw that guy on the J-train."
The moniker Jay-Z is also an homage to the J/Z subway lines that have a stop at Marcy Avenue in Brooklyn.
Evidence aside, those are estimated responses. I know how I reacted when I saw Lou Reed walking up the street in Soho: I ducked into a fucking store until I was sure he had passed. And no it was not a store that sells "fucking" that is just an emphatic adjectival interjection.
Oh, and then, I worked with David Briggs on a record (he produced a bunch of Neil Young records, etc, if you're not familiar with the name) and he was very sick at the time and died not long after. It came about that the band got invited to go out with all his real friends when they were to scatter his ashes at sea off the coast of California-- on Neil Young's big sail boat, if memory serves. Well, I could not go and do this. It just seemed wrong, I mean, I thought that we had gotten close, true, but these were people he had really known all his life and it just seemed wrong for me to intrude on that. They were keeping a promise. They probably thought we were assholes for not going.
This is why being able to go back and examine and explicate this text has been so enriching, it's nice to be able to resolve misapprehensions (or should I say put down the first pass toward a resolution?) I have had--or have been coerced into considering that I should have, or have been thought to have had-- about decisions and choices I made. Patience works and I can be proud of what I did then and also feel free to trust my instincts still-- EVEN IF by the perception of any present moment the things I decide to do seem anti-strategic and cause me to feel a weird form of guilt for not being able to justify them, or for not deciding to simply drop an A-bomb on the situation every time (guilt I ignore, of course.)
Sorry, sorry, this is an inarticulate by-product of working on this project.
But it DOES lead me to believe that I am getting close to finishing this because these are concerns and memories etc that come up and then pass to actually feeling resolved and "dealt with" in the piece. They don't cause any delay in the process of aligning the piece back to its original formal origins nor cause me to question how I have handled the different elements of it or even make me desperate to conceal something that appears personal.
[update--4.17]
 | failed to mention that if I ever met Nick Lowe I would try to make him laugh. what an honor it would be to come up with something on the spot that he thought was funny. i had totally forgotten that in 1979 "Cruel to be Kind" actually peaked at #12 in the US charts, in what i didn't know then were the waning days of, well, all remaining restraints on the reemergence of the Confederacy, let's just say...he also looked tall which i could relate to, most of the rock bands were not tall, at the time. |
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